Diving Into the Taxonomy, Metadata, and Other Foundations of Effective Digital Asset Management

As the number of marketing channels and touchpoints continues to grow, so does the volume of digital assets companies require to fuel those channels and create exceptional brand experiences. A single marketing department could build hundreds of thousands of content assets over time, and that’s without considering visual media, such as images and video, which are also a must for modern marketing teams to engage prospects across channels. Marketing today is driven largely by visual assets, and creating a consistent brand experience across channels is an ever-prominent focus for marketing teams.

Now, here's the kicker: marketing departments are trying not to lose control of these very assets, yet as the volume of digital assets expands, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain control. The best way to manage hundreds of thousands of digital files (effectively, that is) is through some sort of digital asset management (DAM) solution. Fortunately, there are many ready-made solutions that serve this very purpose, meaning marketers don’t have to reinvent the wheel and establish a sophisticated setup from the ground up. As a content management tool, DAM is unparalleled in terms of capabilities around organization, security, maintenance, and advanced search capabilities.

One of the key factors in selecting the right DAM vendor is understanding, metadata, taxonomy, and other important terms and technologies so that you can evaluate features and functionality to choose the solution that best meets your needs. If you’re considering a digital asset management solution, here’s a look at the terms and technologies you need to know – and why they matter.

What is Taxonomy, Anyway?

When referring to a DAM system, taxonomy is used to classify, identify, and organize digital assets. Essentially, taxonomy is used to describe a digital asset in such a way that it’s easy for other users to quickly locate and identify the right asset, for the right purpose, at the right time. Taxonomy takes from the Greek "taxis," which means arrangement and "nomos," which means law. It conveys relationships.

In essence, it uses a pre-determined system to classify assets. Moreover, this pre-determined system is utilized as a framework for the analysis and access of information. Through taxonomy, you get a hierarchical tree structure that ensures files are easy to find – even from multiple locations.

The taxonomy used with a DAM solution has to make sense for every user who accesses your system. And, this ties into metadata as well. The structure of the folders on your hard drive is a good example of a taxonomy in action.

Ideally, your taxonomy should:

• Avoid acronyms
• Be media independent
• Be easily understood by different users
• Avoid abbreviations
• Have a logical hierarchy

Consider a Controlled Vocabulary for Consistency

When configuring a taxonomy, you might want to consider a controlled vocabulary. This limits the terms that can be applied to an asset to a pre-determined set of terms, rather than allowing users to apply any terminology they prefer. A controlled vocabulary is a wise choice for companies managing large volumes of assets – and it’s smart for growing companies who are currently working with limited asset volumes to implement controlled vocabulary now to avoid pain points during future growth.

The premise behind controlled vocabulary is simply that any two users may assign slightly different terminology to the same asset. When this occurs repeatedly, you end up with a large volume of assets that aren’t labeled and categorized consistently, making it increasingly challenging to locate the proper assets when you need them. Controlled vocabulary presents users with a pre-determined list of terms they can choose from to assign proper labels and categorization to each asset, eliminating the possibility for natural language variances.

Using a controlled vocabulary for indexing results in searches that are efficient and precise, saving a substantial amount of time users would otherwise spend searching for all synonyms for a target term.

Understanding Metadata

Now that you have a better understanding of taxonomy, let's move on to metadata. It goes without saying that the terms taxonomy and metadata are used on a daily basis with regards to a DAM system. In the simplest terms, metadata could be the title of a digital asset. Adding a description and even the date of production are additional forms of metadata.

You can also import metadata from various sources. Files may already have embedded metadata such as the geolocation or even the photographer. These wide-ranging attributes help to map your files so that they’re easier to organize and find. Let's just break it down: metadata is data. It’s information that goes beyond the name of the asset.

It is a description of sorts, but the biggest benefit of metadata is that it aids findability by enabling files to be searched based on more than merely the title – because it’s unlikely that marketers remember the specific title of every content asset in the company’s arsenal, and sometimes you need to find relevant assets on the fly. In other words, hours of available time to spend digging through your library to locate a specific asset is a luxury you don’t often have.

Let's say you're watching a football game, and each player comes on the screen. Notice you'll find information such as their college, position on the team, nickname, and perhaps an interesting fact displayed on the side or the bottom of the screen. It’s additional information that tells you more about the asset (in this case, a player) beyond their name.

Metadata generally falls into one of three categories, including:

• Structural– format, length, etc.
• Descriptive– title, keywords, author, etc.
• Administrative – how an asset was created, who created it, when changes were made, who made changes, etc.

One Step Further: Adaptive Metadata

There may be scenarios where you need different metadata fields for each file type – documents, audio files, images, and videos – to ensure organization is more structured for advanced search queries. This is what you might call adaptive metadata, which essentially means that assets of different types have different metadata attributes. It would make sense to label a video or audio asset with a duration variable, for instance, which would provide a simple means for filtering search results to assets of an appropriate length for the channel. On the other hand, a duration attribute on a static photo is unnecessary.

Snapchat videos have a max of 10 seconds, for example, although you can now record multiple videos consecutively for up to one full minute of video, while longer videos are more appropriate for channels like YouTube and Facebook. So, if you’re looking for the right video to post to the company’s Facebook page, for instance, the ability to quickly filter out shorter videos created for Snapchat has the potential to save minutes to hours of your valuable time (and those minutes add up!).

With adaptive metadata, you can set metadata attributes based on the asset type, based on the premise that assets have multiple characteristics and some of those characteristics are hierarchical in nature and/or are related to other taxonomies for a broader class that the asset belongs to. Some DAM solutions allow assets to inherit characteristics from those classes and categories automatically, allowing for better overall classification and a simpler means for assigning comprehensive metadata to each asset. Picturepark is one DAM vendor that does this well, allowing the metadata schemas for individual assets to evolve over time, rather than forcing users to rely on a single, consistent metadata schema across all assets.

Shift from Taxonomy to Metadata